apricot salad

you dont have to save someone from drowning even if youre a strong swimmer. even in death youre not required to donate organs and that could save several people. you can kill someone if you truly believe your safety is at risk. we dont mandate preservation of life over autonomy in any of these circumstances.

I fucking hate this argument and how seriously people take it. We should only have good arguments for abortion and not ludicrous ones

(Also I'm pretty sure that if, for example, a child falls off a cruise liner, then their parent is not legally nor ethically obligated to jump in after them. Not least because doing so instead of doing literally anything else is an excellent way to end up with two drownings instead of one or none. The parent might feel emotionally obligated to etc, but see previous. And yet people keep dying of can't get an abortion fast enough to save the pregnant person's life, even when everyone even peripherally involved, except apparently the ones with a career in law or politics, knows it's physically impossible to preserve the life of the child.)

you dont have to save someone from drowning even if youre a strong swimmer. even in death youre not required to donate organs and that could save several people. you can kill someone if you truly believe your safety is at risk. we dont mandate preservation of life over autonomy in any of these circumstances.

I fucking hate this argument and how seriously people take it. We should only have good arguments for abortion and not ludicrous ones

Fascism was the absolute sensation: in a statement at the time of the first pogroms, Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring. In the Third Reich the abstract horror of news and rumour was enjoyed as the only stimulus sufficient to incite a momentary glow in the weakened sensorium of the masses. Without the almost irresistible force of the craving for headlines, in which the strangled heart convulsively sought a primeval world, the unspeakable could not have been endured by the spectators or even by the perpetrators. In the course of the war, even news of calamity was finally given full publicity in Germany, and the slow military collapse was not hushed up. Concepts like sadism and masochism no longer suffice. In the mass-society of technical dissemination they are mediated by sensationalism, by comet-like, remote, ultimate newness. It overwhelms a public writhing under shock and oblivious of who has suffered the outrage, itself or others. Compared to its stimulus-value, the content of the shock becomes really irrelevant, as it was ideally in its invocation by poets; it is even possible that the horror savoured by Poe and Baudelaire, when realized by dictators, loses its quality as sensation, burns out. The violent rescuing of all qualities in the new was devoid of quality. Everything can, as the new, divested of itself, become pleasure...

WWII was a historic turning point in the evolution of world politics, and the Nazis are near-universally seen as the Ultimate Bad Guys of the episode. Because the Nazis are so widely despised, there are strong incentives for any political movement to accuse their opponents of Nazism, regardless of how strong that comparison might actually be. Yet while there might be plenty of valid comparisons to make, both the USA and the USSR represented political projects which were completely different from that of the Nazi project, which was really quite unique!

Nazism is something very specific, and if you deny that anti-Semitism is central to it you're looking for ways to not think about the Holocaust and the Jewish question when discussing the force that wiped out 80% of all Jews in Europe. Which, whatever reason you're doing that for in your soul which I don't care about at all is concretely in support of anti-semitic political movements.

I have not seen the left, or sections of it, deny that antisemitism is central to historical Nazism. What I have seen is leftists argue that the forms of fascism, which found their most notorious expression in Nazism, are clearly present in societies which were built in opposition to Nazism, and which publicly and honestly deny Nazism and antisemitism vociferously. If we want to understand historical Nazism, then surely we have to explain how this came to be.

How is a reasonable explanation of how those similarities between liberal democracy and fascism came to be the absolute non-answer "through the workings of some conspiracy/deep state plot, the US became the Fourth Reich"? And just because you haven't seen Leftists deny that anti-Semitism is key to Nazism doesn't mean it doesn't happen, have you been active at all for the past ten years? I have heard it, clearly and obviously, in every form, including from you just then! One of the ways leftists make this claim is saying that the US, which is a society that does not attempt to exterminate the Jewish people no matter how much much you try and spin it, is the Fourth Reich/a Nazi society, which it fucking isn't because it isn't organised around opposition to Jewish life, which is to say - it is possible to be Nazi without being organised around anti-semitism. Jesus fucking Christ, can't you hear yourself?

The fact that communists tend to obsess over this--at times to the exclusion of other rational inquiries into the genesis of new fascist movements--because we seek a wholly externalizing explanation for why our movements failed, is embarrassing, but it's nevertheless bothersome to see people not mention it at all or call it "the workings of some conspiracy/deep state plot" implying maybe nothing like that even happened. Yes, communists are particularly motivated to play it up, but liberals should not play it down. I think to be a good liberal (not addressing anyone in particular here besides "liberals") is to be concerned by the fact that the CIA is a deeply illiberal institution with a great deal of power and to consider the history of why this is.